


(In)Appropriate Signage

by sonicSymphony



Series: Soft Stars [2]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Colonist (Mass Effect), F/M, Gen, Good-Natured Teasing of Subordinates, Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2, Paragon Commander Shepard, Ruthless (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-08
Updated: 2017-07-08
Packaged: 2018-11-29 12:49:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11441208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonicSymphony/pseuds/sonicSymphony
Summary: Commander Shepard buys a "baby on board" sign for the Mako. She's faced with an important decision: which of her squadmates should she tease?





	(In)Appropriate Signage

Shepard wasn’t expecting to strike gold at a Lower Wards Market kiosk, but she did. She had no idea why she hadn’t looked at this dingy shop in the past; after all, her squadmates teased her about being a hoarder on missions for good reason. She didn’t accumulate miscellaneous trinkets at the level of a normal hoarder—she _was_ military, and there were severe limits on what she could have that didn’t fit in a footlocker—but she did have an eye for unique items that most people would overlook. What most thought was useless, Shepard could find a use for, even if it was just amusement.

And amusement was exactly what Shepard had in mind when she looked at the details for a small sign she’d found in the catalogue: five inches across, black text with a bright yellow background, plus a suction cup to attach it to glass so it could be read from the other side. In big, centered letters, the sign declared, “BABY ON BOARD.” It was Old Earth Vintage, according to the description, but it was cheap enough for Shepard to infer it wasn’t _classy_ vintage. Since it was only a few credits, she decided what the hell, this could be fun.

As Shepard, Tali, and Ashley stood in the elevator hours later, making their slow way down from C-Sec to the docking bay, Shepard considered the ages of her squadmates. Kaidan and Ashley were both older than her, the former by a few years and the latter by a few months. Wrex and Liara had many years on her, though as Shepard understood it, the asari was the equivalent of a human teenager. Tali was barely out of teenagerdom herself; from what Shepard knew about quarian pilgrimages, most chose to leave the flotilla at the age of twenty, so Tali had to be right around there. She was probably the youngest, but as Shepard and her squad stepped out of the elevator, she had a different idea for her sign.

Garrus Vakarian was a few years younger than Shepard, though she didn’t remember exactly how old he was. His birthday had been in his file, and she’d added it to her calendar—as she did with everyone on her ship—but she had promptly forgotten it. Despite his years in the military and C-Sec, Shepard found him immature. He had a special naivety about him that showed him a world in black and white rather than the spectrum that was there. In these first few months aboard the Normandy, he’d told her stories that showed off both his tenacity and his impatience, and sometimes he uncomfortably reminded her of herself before Torfan.

When that realization had come to her weeks before, she’d decided, _I am going to mentor the shit out of this kid._

Mentoring, as she’d learned with Captain Anderson, sometimes came with good-natured teasing.

For her next mission in the Mako—checking out a distress call that would undoubtedly be a trap—Shepard selected Garrus and Wrex for her squad. Fifteen minutes before drop, Shepard climbed into the tank and stuck her sign on the back window, licking the suction cup and pressing hard to make sure it wouldn’t pop off with all the intense maneuvering. The sign was dual-sided, so if Garrus went back to man the gun like he usually did, there was a chance he could glance to the side and see it. When Shepard went back outside to check the view, it was clearly visible through the back window as well.

She was slightly disappointed when no one mentioned it as they rolled across the random planet of the day. She doubted anyone noticed it (it was a rather small sign on a monstrous vehicle) but that just meant she’d have to keep attaching it until someone said something.

Once they were back on the Normandy, Shepard strode past Garrus to the back of the Mako and plucked the sign off the glass as he was hopping out of the tank. She stuck it in a pocket under a ceramic plate in her armor and exited. As her boots hit the floor, she called, “Debrief in fifteen.”

Before she made it two steps, Garrus said, “Commander,” with a hum in his voice that Shepard wasn’t very good at reading. “You do know there are jump jets on that thing, right? You can use them to soften the fall when you plunge us off mountains.”

Shepard snorted, leaning against the side of the tank. She patted its metal exterior like she would a dog’s soft fur. “The Mako isn’t going to break with a little bit of rough handling.”

Wry, Garrus shot back, “It can and it will. I just fix it between missions.”

“And you’re doing a great job.” Shepard gave him a thumbs-up with her free hand. “You get a gold star, recruit.”

Garrus dipped his head. “Why thank you, Commander.” He looked like he might add something, but his pause dragged on too long so Shepard gave a wave and went to check in on the CIC before the debriefing. If he needed to talk to her about something else, he’d come to her in his own time.

It was important not to suffocate people when trying to help them, Shepard had learned. After Mindoir, she’d been a flighty, half-feral thing who was so scared and angry that every hand reaching out at her was intended to harm rather than help. When Captain Anderson—Lieutenant-Commander Anderson then—first tried to help her, she hadn’t wanted it. She’d run from the Alliance just as she’d run from the Shepard farm and ended up on Omega for a mere two months before she decided to accept Anderson’s help. Though Garrus wasn’t in the same position as she’d been in thirteen years ago, he was at a crossroads in his life, where his old career wasn’t satisfying and he wanted to try to make a difference in another way. She knew that despite his penchant for justice by any means necessary, his moral compass was solid, and he was a good kid. He just needed a bit of direction, and she wanted to show him the way.

Sometimes that meant chatting with him about past missions in the battery, going over what had been successful and what hadn’t been. Other times that meant making impulse purchases with the sole purpose to tease him. She wasn’t singling him out, per se—a week ago, she’d hustled the engineering kids at poker. He was simply her current target.

As Shepard was putting her armor away in her locker, she stuck the sign in with it. For the next rotation, she took Liara and Ashley to deal with a ExoGeni facility, then grabbed Garrus and Kaidan to help track down people that were killing Alliance scientists. She put the BABY ON BOARD sign back in its place, and when Kaidan climbed aboard, he looked at her with raised eyebrows. She mimicked his expression, hoping he’d bring it up, but Lt. Alenko just smiled and sat in the seat behind her. Garrus was oblivious to this exchange, shouldering past them both to get to the gun mount. Though the sign was right next to him on the back window, he didn’t even glance at it.

Shepard shouldn’t have been this frustrated about a joke, but for someone with police training, Garrus should’ve picked up on it by now. She pointedly removed the sign after the mission as Garrus ran diagnostics on the Mako, checking what he had to repair.

For the next week, it was busy as she took Kaidan and Liara down to Feros and did what she could to help there. As more evidence came to her, she understood the need to get to Virmire, but once she was off Feros for good, Admiral Hackett had a new assignment for her.

“It’s Major Kyle,” he said, and Shepard’s mouth went dry.

Torfan was a mission she could not afford to forget. It was tactically brilliant—the Alliance used it as a case study to teach recruits for God’s sake—but when she first realized they weren’t analyzing it to make sure it never happened again, Shepard had felt sick.

She was not proud of the person she was before Torfan. She was not proud that it was Torfan that had gotten her Spectre status. She was, however, determined to never be the kind of Commander to sacrifice troops recklessly for a mission and kill civilians. She would never be that monster again, even if people continued to praise her for her decision-making and tactics.

Shepard was so distracted by the steady pulse of butcher, butcher, butcher in her head that she almost forgot to take the sign out of her locker. She grabbed it before locking up and taking the elevator down to the cargo bay. She secured the sign to the Mako’s back window as she had with every one of Garrus’s missions since she’d bought it.

Today, her squad was Garrus and Tali. If they noticed that Shepard was quieter than usual, they didn’t comment, letting their banter fill the empty space between the gun mount and front of the Mako, where Tali sat in the seat behind Shepard. This was one of the reasons Shepard decided to take them both today: Shepard wasn’t up for a chat, but Garrus and Tali could gab to each other until the sun burned out. They’d become closer after Garrus had apologized for the anti-quarian bullshit he’d tried to pull when Tali first joined the squad.

When they got to the compound, Shepard was grateful to get through without having to kill anyone. Major Kyle thought she was a monster still, though, and maybe she was; bad deeds never died, even if the witnesses did. She let him call her the Butcher of Torfan, and in her peripheral, she saw Garrus flinch. He was looking at Kyle with wide eyes, his mandibles slack. This was his first time hearing someone call her that to her face. His grip on his assault rifle tightened.

Shepard made a hand movement behind her back, ordering him to stand down as she talked calmly to her old commanding officer, getting him to agree to surrender to the Alliance by playing up his commitment to his “children”. She looked at Major Kyle and saw what she could’ve been, if she had allowed Torfan to break her, if she hadn’t looked at herself in the mirror every morning since and willed herself to do better, _be_ better.

Kyle couldn’t live with the decisions Shepard had been forced to make for him. Even after five years, Shepard was still learning to live with them herself.

The short walk back to the Mako was silent. They called in the Normandy and Shepard worried, her knee bouncing as she sat in the driver’s seat, waiting for extraction. What if Kyle went back on his promise and refused to surrender in an hour? What if the Alliance went in and blew up the facility anyway, like she’d decimated the strongholds of Torfan even after surrender orders?

Shepard was the last one out of the Mako, as usual, once it was back on the Normandy. “We’ll debrief after I hear from Hackett,” she said, walking briskly down the side of the tank toward the elevator.

Garrus’s voice stopped her. “Okay, I’ll ask,” he said, sounding cheerful with an undercurrent of something that might’ve been nervousness. “What’s with the sign?”

Sighing, Shepard turned back. Her head was still clouded with screaming batarians. “What sign?”

“This one.” Garrus gestured at the yellow diamond plastered onto the back window of the Mako. BABY ON BOARD, it professed. “I didn’t think we brought any children into fire-fights.” His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Plus you only put it up whenever you take me groundside.”

She’d forgotten to take it down in her haste to be alone. Shepard snorted, lips begrudgingly curling into a smile as she replied, “Congratulations, Garrus. You’re the baby.”

He put a hand to his chest, wounded. “ _Me_? I’m twenty-five!”

“Commander,” she said, trying to imitate his voice; it was hard without sub-vocals, “did you know turians hate the cold? Commander, why didn’t you let me shoot Saleon? Commander, I’m twenty-five, I’m an adult—”

“Turians become adults when they finish boot camp. I’ve been an adult longer than you have!”

Shepard quirked an eyebrow. “Vakarian, just how old do you think I am?”

His mandibles drooped a bit. Clearly his initial estimates had been off, and her date of birth wasn’t the important information he’d found in her C-Sec file. “Uh. Twenty…seven?

“Hah!” Shepard crossed her arms over her chest, grinning. “I’m twenty-nine. Military from eighteen, so eleven years of duty. You have ten.”

Garrus tried to recover. “That’s still not a huge difference. Tali’s twenty! Liara’s an asari teenager! Why am I the baby?”

“Listen to yourself!” Shepard laughed. “Whine, whine, whine! This is just solidifying my case.”

“Okay, fine,” he huffed. “What I _do_ want to know is who told you about my nickname.”

Shepard cocked her head to the side. “Your nickname?” she repeated.

“From C-Sec,” he clarified. “There was about a year of overlap when my dad and I both worked there before he retired, so some of his colleagues started calling me Baby Vakarian.”

Shepard barked a surprised laugh. “ _No_.”

Garrus gave a long-suffering sigh. “I wish I were joking.”

“That sounds like a stripper name!” Shepard was dumbfounded. He had to be yanking her chain.

“Wow!” Garrus exclaimed. “Inappropriate.” He mimed bringing up a call on his omnitool. “Yes, hello, is this the Alliance? I’d like to report Commander Shepard for sexual harassment.”

“Hey, I’m not the one calling you Baby Vakarian,” she said, raising her hands in surrender. “I’m just making an age-joke with a two-century-old car sign.”

Garrus shook his head slowly, lowering his omnitool. “You win this round, Commander. Just wait until next time we’re in the Mako and I can poke more fun at your driving.”

“Hah!” Shepard exclaimed, pointing at him. “Human idiom!”

He groaned. “Get out of here, you’re embarrassing me!” Garrus sounded like a petulant teenager and he knew it.

When the elevator doors closed behind Shepard, Ashley turned around, leaning against her station. “I thought you said you were going to let her stew in the anticipation.”

Garrus gave a small shrug. “Guess I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I really wanted to know why she was so determined to tease me.”

Ashley smirked. “I just didn’t know turians could be sweet, that’s all.”

Torfan still weighed Shepard down. The whole crew knew it and struggled to do anything to make it better. Garrus scratched the back of his neck, feeling uncomfortable under Ashley’s scrutiny. “It’s almost like we’re people.”

The gunnery chief blinked, smirk dropping. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” Garrus said. He flicked a mandible up, crossing the room to get to his locker. “Don’t get used to it, Williams. I don’t think ‘sweet’ is in my arsenal.”

“Whatever you say, Baby Vakarian.”

 

* * *

 

Alchera was cold and barren and full of ghosts. Shepard came back to the SR-2 with twenty dog tags, her old N7 helmet, and something she’d left in the Mako even after Garrus went back to C-Sec.

When she walked into the main battery after her trek across the freezing planet’s surface, Garrus didn’t look up from his work immediately, but he did say, “Hey, Shepard. Need me for—?”

He didn’t get to finish before Shepard slapped the back of his armor, hard, just below the upper ridge of his cowl. His question broke into an awkward cough, and he whirled around to glare at her. Shepard just grinned impishly. Garrus said, “What, you went down to Alchera and now you want to fight? I figured you’d want to talk about it, not punch your poor innocent gunnery chief.”

Shepard dryly said, “Like I’d unpack my baggage on the crew.”

Garrus’s browplates rose. “I hope that’s an idiom. I don’t need you to smack me with a suitcase.”

“I’ll go get my footlocker,” Shepard said, and then she was gone before Garrus could get another word in.

Later, Garrus went out to the mess for dinner, and it didn’t take long for him to realize he was getting some weird stares. It wasn’t until Tali walked in with two of the other engineers and erupted into giggles that Garrus became alarmed.

“What is it?” he demanded, stalking up to the quarian and nervously smoothing his fringe back. Was there something stuck in his teeth? Had someone tampered with his uniform?

She continued to laugh, grabbing his arm and using it to balance as she reached around his back and pulled something off his armor. It made a slight popping sound as it was extracted, and Tali said with glee, “I can’t believe she found this!”

Tali pressed the old BABY ON BOARD sign into his hands, cackling, and Garrus squinted at it. No wonder Shepard had smacked him earlier—she was sticking it on. “Ha ha,” he said, tucking it away. “Very funny.” Now he could go back to eating without anyone staring at him (or at least, no more stares than usual—it was bizarre being a dextro-amino carnivore on a Cerberus vessel).

The next day when Shepard did her rounds, she was pleased to find that Garrus had stuck her old sign to his workstation. “Where’d you find that old thing?” she asked, playing dumb.

Garrus turned, leaning back against the console and crossing his arms over his chest. “You know, the weirdest thing happened—it just appeared on my back. Tali found it and nearly had a suit rupture from laughing so hard.”

Shepard said, “Maybe you should pass it on to her. She _is_ younger than you.”

Glancing back at it, Garrus thought about the SR-1. It had been rash to quit C-Sec and run away with a Spectre, but the same woman who his father would’ve decried as a terrible role-model had been the kind of no-nonsense, responsible mentor Garrus had needed. Even though he’d grown up in the two years Shepard had been dead, he had expected the same mentorship deal he’d gotten on the first Normandy, but had been pleasantly surprised when they ended up closer to good friends than mentor-mentee.

“You just want to hide the fact that we’re only two years apart now,” Garrus said.

“That’s not how that works and you know it!” Shepard exclaimed. “I’m thirty-two.”

“Nuh-uh.” Garrus shook his head. “Since you weren’t gathering life experience from the grave, I’d say you don’t get two more years. Sure, I’ll give you a few months and make you thirty, but to claim you’re thirty-two is illegitimate.”

“Okay, Age Specialist Vakarian,” Shepard said, leaning on the console next to him, mirroring his posture. “If I don’t get those two years of dead time, how old do you consider Grunt? He did just go through krogan puberty, but I let him out of the tank, what… two months ago?”

Garrus could’ve gone with the correct ‘but that’s different!’ answer, but instead he deadpanned, “Exactly. We have a two-month-old krogan onboard, Shepard. Maybe he should get the sign.”

“I guess you’re right,” Shepard said lightly. She reached over to swipe the sign off the metal he’d stuck it to, but Garrus reached out to catch her wrist, stopping her.

There was a moment where neither of them knew what to say. One awkward conversation about sparring didn’t prep them for actual intimacy. Garrus knew he should release his grip on her, but he didn’t. “No,” he said. “I wanna keep it.”

“I thought you were an adult,” Shepard said, voice low but still teasing him.

Now, he did let go of her. She drew her arm back to her side as Garrus forced a laugh. “Yeah, well, I’m used to it now. The sign is part of the main battery décor.”

“Sure it is, Baby Vakarian,” Shepard said. She took a step back toward the door, but didn’t turn away from him.

He considered bringing up his old sexual harassment joke, but that might fall flat now that… well. Now that he wouldn’t consider it harassment. “Just let me know if you need anything else, Shepard.”

She nodded once before exiting the main battery, leaving him to his calibrations. As he worked, his eyes kept glancing to the sign hanging in his workspace, making him think about how his relationship with Shepard had changed. If he could go back to the SR-1 and tell himself that he actually had a chance with the mentor he hero-worshipped, he’d never believe it. Hell, she could back out at any moment; Spirits forbid he pressure her into anything she wasn’t sure about.

Looking back to the sign and its proclamation, Garrus _was_ sure about one thing: he sure as hell was on board for this.

**Author's Note:**

> Now that I've played through the trilogy (almost) twice, I figured it was time to start posting some fic. I have several more ideas for oneshots and a longer work in mind, but with work and school, we'll see where this goes. You can find me on my [bioware tumblr](https://mordinsolas.tumblr.com/) or my [clusterfuck main blog](http://redweddingcrashers.tumblr.com/).


End file.
